A parental-rights lawsuit has been filed against the School District of the Chathams Board of Education, alleging the district enables “secret gender transitions behind closed doors,” according to the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) and the verified complaint.
The filing
The Thomas More Society filed the federal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey on behalf of Moms for Liberty. The suit challenges the district’s Policy 5145.7 as unconstitutional, alleging violations of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.
What the complaint alleges
The verified complaint asserts that district policy allows school counselors to withhold information about a student’s social gender transition from parents. It also alleges students can be referred to outside LGBTQ advocacy groups without parental notice or consent.
Quoting the complaint, DCNF reports: “Activist school boards across the country are radically interfering with the moral and religious development of the impressionable and suggestible children in their captive audiences by imposing ‘gender transition’ policies.” The complaint further alleges the district “has followed this trend of arrogant usurpation of the constitutionally protected right of parents to guide the religious and moral formation of their children….”
DCNF states that, in part, File Code/Policy 5145.7 provides: “the Commissioner of Education directs school districts to accept a student’s asserted gender identity regardless of parent consent or involvement.”
Statements from parties
Thomas More Society senior counsel Christopher Ferrara told DCNF: “When Thomas More Society prevailed at the Supreme Court, we made a promise: any school board or district that kept hiding a child’s so-called ‘gender transition’ from parents, or that punished kids for refusing to bow down to an ideology they don’t believe, would be held accountable.”
Moms for Liberty CEO and co-founder Tina Descovich said in a statement to DCNF: “Parents are the primary educators and caregivers of their children, not school boards, not counselors, and not ideologues pushing secret gender transitions behind closed doors.” She added that the group views the Chathams Board of Education as in “open defiance of the Supreme Court’s clear rulings in Mirabelli and Mahmoud.”
District response
According to DCNF, the School District of the Chathams’ Board of Education did not respond to its request for comment.
What’s next
The suit seeks to block enforcement of the challenged policy on constitutional grounds. Further filings were not included in the DCNF report.
